The traditional first rule of business is to give the customers what they want. Steve Jobs thought differently. "It's not the consumers' job," he said, "to know what they want."
Some people think that's cool -- the cocky self-confidence of a visionary with uncompromising standards. But I can't help but hear it as a reminder that companies target consumers by creating desires we didn't know we had and meeting them with cheap shiny gadgets we didn't know we needed. And when the companies get caught trashing the environment or mistreating their workers, everyone blames the customers -- that's us -- for demanding cheap shiny gadgets.
I've been thinking about this since news of the suicides at the Foxconn factory in China and other revelations about the disturbing details of Apple's supply chain produced a wave of guilt among Americans who can't imagine life without their iPhones, iPads and iPods. (On Thursday, after an Apple-endorsed investigation of factory conditions by the independent Fair Labor Association, Foxconn agreed to end illegal overtime, improve safety and upgrade worker housing.)
Sometimes it seems everything we buy is tarnished by guilt. Whether it's electronics from unsafe factories, clothes from oppressive sweatshops or coffee from the rainforest, we blame ourselves and our fellow consumers for our complicity in an unjust and unsustainable system. In a course I'm taking on impacts of the global economy, a classmate said: "It's our fault. We're driving this system. If we didn't buy the stuff, the manufacturers wouldn't make it."
Consumer as king is the gospel of today's marketplace. In an oft-cited editorial The Economist declared: "Brands do not rule consumers; consumers rule brands." After I wrote my local newspaper decrying all the branded schwag hospitals hand out to new mothers, one angry woman wrote me to object: "We control the manufacturers. It is never them controlling us, and it never has been."
Really? Ask yourself:
• If Apple didn't keep rolling out new, massively-hyped models, how many owners of perfectly functional iPhones would want a new one after a few months?
• Before single-serving plastic bottles, who wanted to carry around a throwaway container of water that, despite no guarantee of being cleaner or safer, costs thousands of times more than what comes out of the tap?
• How many mothers would have thought the best way to protect their kids was with pajamas soaked in neurotoxic flame-retardant chemicals, still on the market 35 years they were first identified as a health risk?
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that companies aren't just giving us what we want; they're also manufacturing "wants that previously did not exist." "Production," he wrote, "only fills a void that itself has created."
Maybe the $130 billion-plus spent on advertising in the United States in 2010 had something to do with it. Last year, Apple alone spent almost $1 billion on advertising to persuade us that the latest version of their devices will transform our lives. They add cool new features, sure, but they also tweak the designs just enough that the hippest users can tell at a glance if you're a loser who's still using last year's model. That's not just planned obsolescence, it's perceived obsolescence.
Another tactic is making us feel we're in charge by offering us lots of choices. Choices, after all, create profitable niche markets. In Consumed, Rutgers political theorist Benjamin Barber says we are "seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but the power is in the determination of what's on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers."
I'm not saying we are powerless to make ethical choices with our purchases or that our choices can't influence the marketplace. The problem with believing the best way to make change is by voting with our pocketbooks is that it defines us as consumers, not citizens. It implies that the most important choices are made in the supermarket aisles rather than in the halls of government and corporate towers.
Next time someone says they feel guilty for owning an iPhone, ask if they were the one who decided to maintain a 73% profit margin while underpaying workers on 18-hour-shifts. Did they decide to roll out new models at breakneck speed? To use conflict minerals and toxic chemicals? I didn't think so. The most important ethical choice is not the decision to buy an iPhone, but the decision made on how to make, market and sell it.
Let's stop thinking like consumers and think like citizens. By all means let's shun products from companies whose behavior offends. But let's also realize we can work to change not just the way they act but the way they're allowed to act. Only when every manufacturer of Stuff is required to make it safely and fairly will we know that no matter what we buy, the important choices have already been made.
Adam Hanft: Foxconn and the Curious Silence of Social Media
Tom Grasty: The Difference Between "Invention" and "Innovation"
This iillustrates one way that companies control the balance between planned and percieved obsolescence without tarnishing the brand - at least in the eyes of my boyfriend, who keeps asking me why I want his old iPad when I could just go get one that works.
I use this iPad becuase I'm job hunting and need my email all day, but my phone routinely vapor-locks loosing its ability to bring the data because AT&T keeps inputting that I have a 3G*S*. They giggle when I call, again, to say its the older og model.
Quality problems I know, but I would say we are not the ones in control.
Seems to miss the point that we don't have proportional representation in North America. Who is in power is not a reflection of the people, but a reflection of the people as abstracted through a complex process, which includes corporations.
This is supposed to be *Democracy*. The choice has to be made by the people, and those choices need to be manifest in both where we spend money (effecting economy) and in discussion with our government (effecting policy). It can't be one or the other, but as power is currently structured, it appears where you spend money wins in terms of influence.
Like it or not, buying X validates X and all the ways it effects the world.
The whole production of apple and other technology companies are good for china and chinese people. You can say that their loans are a rip off but only in our sense. Both production circumstances and loan are good for this areas in china. Believe it or not. And both will get even better with time - normal process. Higher loans could also be bad for the rest of the economy because it can produce unsatisfaction in the area.
Still talking of the suicides? Sorry, it is even normal among european companies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8252547.stm Over 20 deads last year for france telecom... It's not high for china, so why are we still putting it on one company?
Apple products are the least thrown away products you can think of! That's why they are still so valuable even if you buy or sell a pretty old product... look at other companies and you will find smaller product circle and your waste problem.
In the last paragraph Annie wrote "By all means let's shun products from companies whose behavior offends. But let's also realize we can work to change not just the way they act but the way they're allowed to act."
Her point is that framing this issue exclusively around consumer demand gives the manufacturers an easy out -- they're just meeting demand and trying to make a profit. We also, as citizens, need to advocate for better regulations of the manufacturing and extractive industries.
You suggest that we can just solve problems by not buying the product... but wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to make that decision? Wouldn't it be great if we could just know, for sure, that the products on the shelves were made ethically?
I signed a petition to Apple going around on FB which seemed legit representing Chinese workers, and hope this had an effect, but unsure how else to be a good citizen to influence Apple, which working full time and raising young kids. While 'sitting on the nest' raising kids it is easy to resort to 'slacktivism' -signing petitions online and I wonder how effective this is. Would love to hear your comments Annie- or a link to where you have addressed this. I have just started as a high school English teacher in Australia and I show your fabulous 'Story of Stuff' whenever it is related to what we are studying! Students love it!
I think an important insight from your piece is to ask the "really?" question with respect to how much our role as citizens/consumers should really be in promoting sustainability.
Your attempt to put the locus of the responsibility on the producers (companies/capitalism, etc.) makes sense but of course the devil is in the details even after promoting more active citizenship: how much can we trust our government and corporate towers (as you call them) to do the job for us?
I have had similar concerns about this and have yet to come to a conclusion on how the demand for goods (or superfluous production of it, as you suggest) helps our cause for a more sustainable future given resource constraints.
On the angle for corporate reform, I personally remain skeptical how quickly or effective this will be and actually almost argue the OPPOSITE of your point: people/citizens/consumers have to change just as much as corporations.
Here's how:
'A Tale of Sheep and Monks - Why Even "Sustainable" Capitalism is Not The Answer' (http://wp.me/p24jhN-hO)
Here's to greater citizenship and moving away from consumerism.
Regards,
Thien
GoodGeneration.org
Because of their size and success, Apple is under attack by people who's seeking attention for a cause, organization, competing business, whatever. Apple is the new "love to hate" company.
Criticizing others than Apple just does not seem to be sexy enough, not sensational enough, not selling enough magazines, newspapers or not generating enough hits and clicks. Criticizing Apple is easy because it is familiar and something we all can relate to. But it does not make it sensible and it is shallow, one-dimensional journalism at best.
Real investigation in labor rights and working conditions and influence on these are time consuming and requires insight in culture and political mechanisms. Yes, Apple is a major stakeholder in dealing with the working conditions at their suppliers. They know by now that transparency on these issues is the next, big asset.
So can one, based on the latest months developments, really fail them? They are actually making a significant effort for change.
Changing the labor conditions in the second largest economy in the world is not done over night by one company alone, even if it is has a market capitalization equal to the GDP of South Africa. Shooting only at Apple is not seeing the forest for the trees.
http://www.jamesconvey.com/1/post/2012/02/the-unions-a-political-impasse.html
Bernie,
Vermont
The problem is NOT that we define ourselves as either consumer or citizen, since both roles severely limit our humanity. If we understood ourselves as partners in the Web of Life, and responsible as much for Its well-being as for our own (or more so, since without It, we cannot survive), then we would not be childish "Americans who can't imagine life without their iPhones, iPads and iPods". We would be responsible adults who know that neither our own happiness nor the health of the planet requires the ever-expanding plethora of "stuff" that our culture insists we must have - and, in fact, neither our own well-being nor the planet can tolerate it any longer, if ever it could.
If "the most important ethical choice is not the decision to buy an iPhone", then it IS the decision to NOT buy into the madness of material affluence and acquisitiveness that is destroying our planet and our future.
Guys, from an environmental perspective, smartphones must be something of the better the world has seen over the last decade. I sincerely believe that one device shipped around the globe is better than 10 different shipments with separate packaging delivered to the store in 10 different trucks and produced under more or less the same conditions.
If you want to have access to all those functions (and I guess, many have that need), you have the choice between bad (1 gadget) or worse (plenty of stuff).